Latin America manages its business travel less than anywhere. That is the opportunity.
Half of the region's companies run travel without a managed program. The usual reading is that we are behind. I think the usual reading is wrong.
Every year the industry’s data tells the same story about my region, and every year almost everyone draws the same conclusion from it, and I think the conclusion is a mistake.
Here is the story. Across the world, roughly two thirds of companies require or encourage the use of a managed travel program, a travel management company or a corporate booking tool. In Latin America, that figure is about half. The region also has the lowest adoption of formal expense systems anywhere measured, used by only about a third of companies. On nearly every measure of how professionally managed corporate travel is, Latin America sits at the bottom of the global table.
The conclusion almost everyone draws is that the region is behind, and that catching up is a matter of time and adoption. I want to argue for a completely different reading of the exact same numbers.
What “unmanaged” actually means
Start with what those numbers describe on the ground, because the word unmanaged hides more than it reveals.
A company without a managed travel program is not a company that does not travel. It is a company whose travel is happening anyway, booked on consumer sites, paid on personal cards, reimbursed through spreadsheets, approved over messaging apps, and reconstructed painfully at the end of every month from a pile of receipts. The travel is real. The spend is real. What is missing is not the activity. It is the visibility.
So when half of Latin American companies run travel without a managed program, that is not an absence of a market. It is an enormous volume of business travel happening entirely outside anyone’s ability to see it, negotiate it, protect it, or improve it. The demand is already there. It is simply invisible.
That distinction changes everything about how you read the number.
Why a mature market is a worse opportunity, not a better one
Here is the part that global players consistently get backwards.
If you are a travel platform, a hotel group, an airline, or an investor looking at where to build, a fully managed market is not the attractive one. It is the saturated one. A region where ninety percent of companies already run a professional program is a region where growth means taking share from an incumbent, one painful contract at a time, competing mostly on price because the category is already understood and already sold.
An under-managed market is the opposite. The growth there does not require convincing a company to switch from a competitor. It requires converting travel that is currently informal, invisible, and unmanaged into travel that is finally organized. No incumbent has to lose for the new provider to win. The market itself expands as the informal becomes formal.
That is the single most attractive growth dynamic there is, and it is precisely the dynamic the data describes in Latin America. The low management rate that reads as backwardness is, read correctly, the largest greenfield in the global travel industry.
The Uber lesson
I keep coming back to a comparison everyone in this region understands in their body, because they lived it.
Most people reading this remember what it was like to get a taxi before the app. You called a number. You waited without knowing if the car was coming. You had no idea what it would cost until the end. You had no record of the trip and no recourse if something went wrong. It was a bad experience that everyone accepted because nobody had shown them there was another way.
Then the technology arrived, and adoption was not slow. It was instant, because the old experience had been quietly painful the whole time, and people only understood how painful once they felt the alternative. The market did not need to be educated into wanting it. It needed to be shown it existed.
That is exactly the shape of the corporate travel and expense opportunity in Latin America. The pain of the unmanaged status quo, the personal card, the sixty-day reimbursement, the month-end receipt hunt, the total lack of visibility, is enormous and universal and mostly unspoken, precisely because most companies have never felt the alternative. A region does not adopt slowly when the new thing is genuinely better. It adopts all at once, the moment it sees the other side of the story.
We have proof of this in the same dataset. The region with the lowest management rate also shows some of the highest mobile and app-based behavior in the world. Where a good tool exists, people here do not resist it. They take to it faster than almost anyone. The barrier was never culture. It was coverage.
What this asks of the people who serve this region
If I am right that this is opportunity rather than deficiency, then it places a real obligation on the companies that want to serve it, and I include my own.
It means the job here is not to sell a managed program the way you would in a saturated market, as a marginally better version of something the buyer already has. It is to show a company that has never had visibility what visibility feels like, and to make the alternative to the painful status quo so obviously better that adoption becomes the easy choice, the way hailing a car on a phone became the easy choice.
It means building for the reality of this region rather than importing a program designed for New York or London and assuming it fits. The instant-payment behavior, the mobile-first habits, the specific frictions of operating across many currencies and tax regimes, these are not obstacles to work around. They are the design brief.
And it means treating the low management rate not as evidence that the region does not care about professional travel management, but as evidence that nobody has yet made it good enough, local enough, and easy enough to adopt at the scale the region is clearly ready for.
Not behind. Early.
So I will keep pushing back on the reading that says Latin America is behind on managed travel.
The region is not behind. It is early. And early, in a market this size, with demand this real and visibility this low, is the most valuable place a market can possibly be, for the companies serving it and for the companies inside it that are about to discover what they have been missing.
The lowest management rate in the world is not the bottom of a table. Read correctly, it is the front of a line.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.